Two Years Into Biden’s Climate Plan, Emissions Are Higher Than Ever

Green energy and fossil fuels are rising hand in hand. The growth-based climate framework is fundamentally broken.

By Peter Gelderloos, In These Times

August 16 marked the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), legislation that has funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into green energy and electric vehicles. While the Act made unprecedented investments in renewable energy, it also faced criticism for being too little, too late and for compromising on fossil fuel extraction. In response, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan acknowledged the bill’s shortcomings but explained the administration’s approach: “We’re using every tool in our toolbox to drive down climate pollution as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”

But let’s take this anniversary to entertain a horrifying doubt: What if the toolbox itself is inadequate? What if, on the contrary, all the tools only make a dire crisis even worse? Because that’s exactly what’s happening: Two years and close to $300 billion later, what we’re seeing is that increased renewable energy investment goes hand in hand with increased fossil fuel production.

Harmful emissions into the atmosphere causing global warming coming from smoke stack towers in city pollution

What’s even more horrifying? Social movements around the world have been predicting this outcome for years or even decades, but they have been shut out of the mainstream conversation. In fact, nobody with any sizable platform is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, that the entire international framework around climate change is designed to fail.

And while the circus of false solutions keeps getting louder, we have probably already passed the point of no return, meaning carbon saturation and the beginning of a domino effect that will lead to 2.5–5C of global warming, mass extinction, and hundreds of millions or billions of human deaths. (For an overview of the data, check out this supplementary article).